Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Arsenal Joga Bonito Wednesday: Current Events Edition

I did miss a good weekend of proper footy while on my weekend excursion. Sunday alone had Reading-Arsenal, Manchester United-Liverpool, and El Classico over in Spain: Real Madrid-Barcelona.

Arsenal destroyed Reading by 4 goals to nil while (apparently from all that I have read and seen) playing their best Arsenal Joga Bonito since the golden years of 2002-2004. In honor of this new team full of kids playing flawless beautiful Wengerball, the highlights of this match will serve as this week's AJBW. Enjoy.

Props, too, to the traveling Gooners for being so loud

Hopefully they can keep it going this weekend against Everton. In those other matches ManUtd beat The Pool 2-0 and Real Madrid gave European Champion and 2 time defending La Liga champion Barcelona a 2-0 thumping, their 2nd loss in 5 days. When is the last time Barcelona lost 2 matches in a row? Methinks they miss Eto'o alot more than they thought they would - just goes to show how special a striker he is, and I for one just hope that he can come back and play at that level again, as he is only 24 years old and should have the 4 best years of his career ahead of him if he can get his knee back to 100%.

12 comments:

moin
said...

I watched the Arsenal-Reading match while slowly waking up on Sunday (I know it took place about 2pm, but come on, it was Sunday). From what I recall (most of the 2nd half), Arsenal did look very impressive and, before they pulled it back, had a very nice cutting edge to it all. Walcott didn't do anything when he came on though, but it did lead to some nice crowd shots of his girlfriend (Theo is playing above his level, of course).

Yeah, I just got Morbo in the mail (along with Tor! and my DVDs of Once in a Lifetime and the History of Soccer, needless to say, I'm binging on footie right about now).

Phil Ball is very good, though he loves to take digs at RM (then again, who doesn't? I'm a fan and even I like to take digs). It is nice to read analysis from a coherent source within Spain once in a while. I'm already a fan of his. :)

You'll like Morbo - it's a good read. The only knock on it that I had was implying that the concept of Morbo was somehow unique or stronger in Spain or somehow exclusive to Spain. It's a nebulous buzzword that could be used to describe almost any sporting passion in any other country. But the content of the book is very good. His weekly writeups on La Liga and Spain's NT are also very good, as he doesn't support any of the big clubs so his views are relatively unbiased and objective. I'm sure White Storm is very good as well.

I'd like to get Tor! at some point, as I also enjoy reading that author's weekly columns on German soccer for Soccernet - his name is Uli-something-something or other.

I'm just glad I didn't expend any domestic political capital on watching the Real Madrid - Barca game live on Saturday afternoon... van Nistelrooy's goal was a thing of beauty, but otherwise Real's play was disruptive and relied on a fast break... I can watch Bolton for that, without the added loathing.

You're completely right about Eto'o by the way... Barca looked like Arsenal on an off day, beautiful football but totally unable to finish, and Gudjonsson (sp?) is no real substitute.

I wish they were in the same class, so that Wenger could buy Robinho for 500,000 pounds, make him a star, win a double, and then sell him to RM for 22.3 million pounds for a tidy 21.8 million pound profit.